Bohren & Der Club of Gore

A little over five years after “Piano Nights” and more than eleven years after “Dolores” Bohren & Der Club of Gore published their eights studio album “Patchouli Blue” which has an unusual amount of tracks (eleven) for the band. 

The playtime of these eleven tracks on the other hand is just over an hour, what implies that the specific Bohren-Vibe of savoring sublime slowness is able to be established within a very short time. 

The album opener of “Patchouli Blue” (2020) “Total falsch” is an ideal kickoff and implicates the exact opposite of what the title promises. Typical Bohren. 

Depending on the character of the listener it might take two, sometimes four notes or even two minutes to indicate: You are on Bohren terrain, now is the time to revenge everything! The use of the organ already makes you go down on your knees and the upcoming saxophone directs the careful developed tension onto the landscape, where one no longer can exclude an encounter with Jan Garbarek. But there are more surprises following. Not to be expected, for example, is a song like “Deine Kusine” which radiates with lightness. 

Or right after that „Vergessen und vorbei” which, with its rhythm machine and analog synthesizer, that sounds like a soundtrack to the John Carpenter movie, that he forgot to shoot. If you ask the band “Patchouli Blue” suits the mixing ratio of four parts “typical Bohren”, three parts “weird” and four parts “jazz sneak”. As a bonus exists the shadow of a story behind the order of song titles, that you can make up yourself, depending on your temperament. 

Bohren never had a title track before. “Patchouli Blue” points back to india stores in the 1970s with their heavy scents. 

The eleven sound sculptures, which Bohren freed from their redundancy with hard and disciplined work offer plenty of material for acoustic journeys of discovery. Now it’s time to rehearse the songs for their upcoming live performances.